IVT News

Google Analytics gets an event-tracking feature... at last!
Fri, Oct 31 2008

By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director

Just over two years ago I made a prediction about major changes that would need to be made in web statistics / analytics systems to enable them to keep track of the way people use websites. My prediction (made in October 2006: you can read the original article at www.ivt.com.au/news/id/78) was that the old "page view" methodology was obsolete and that stats systems would need to start caring not about pages but about "events".

I'm happy to say that a few minutes ago that prediction finally came true!

Google Analytics, one of the most popular web stats systems in the world, has just started testing an "Event Tracking" feature on some selected customer sites.

Just to re-cap my original prediction, the basic problem is that websites have traditionally been "page-based". Users view one page on a site, then click a link to go to another page, read it, click a link to go to another, and so on. As a result, analytics packages have traditionally been very focused on this "page based" concept of user activity. Everyone in the industry talks about metrics like pages-per-visit and time-per-page when trying to analyse how well a website is working.

But new techniques and technologies such as Ajax, Flex, Silverlight, and other "rich Internet application" (RIA) approaches break out of the "page" paradigm and instead let users interact with websites and web applications in a way that's much more like a regular desktop program. They allow drag-and-drop, and in-page updates, and transitions that aren't really page-loads at all. In many cases a user viewing a web application will only perform a single "page view" when they first load it in their browser, and after that all the interaction will be through "asynchronous" communication between their browser and the web server.

So analytics systems need to go beyond recording a sequence of page views and start caring about "events", such as actions the user performs while they stay on the same page. An event could be something like dragging a picture of a product onto a shopping cart icon to add it to their cart: it wasn't a "page view" in the traditional sense, but it's definitely a critical event that the site owner would like reported in their analytics system!

It's great to see Google Analytics now trialling event tracking, which is a very strong indication of the growing popularity of online systems being built as web applications rather than traditional page-based websites.

I'm just surprised that it's taken so long!

Jonathan Oxer
Technical Director
Internet Vision Technologies